Arthur Elrod: Desert Modern Design

By Adele Cygelman

Arthur Elrod was the most successful interior designer working in Palm Springs from 1954 to 1974. His forward-thinking midcentury design appeared in primary homes, second houses, spec houses, country clubs, and experimental houses—in the desert and across the US. He was charming, handsome, and worked tirelessly for his A-list clientele. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gibbs Smith
• Release date: Feb 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781423648796

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Photo of Arthur Elrod’s Lanai/Beach Cabana.

Arthur Elrod’s Lanai/Beach Cabana with all-weather upholstery, vinyl floors, and outdoor grill was originally installed at the 1st Annual Palm Springs Decorators & Antique Show and Sale, which launched in 1961 at the Palm Springs Playhouse, and then reinstalled in 1962 at a New York design show.

George R. Szanik/George Szanik papers (Collection 1799), Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA

Photo of guest bedroom from Marsha Hagadone’s summer lake house.

A guest bedroom in publisher Duane and Marsha Hagadone’s summer lake house shows Elrod’s mastery of bold colors and multiple patterns.

No one outside Palm Springs knows Arthur Elrod’s name. But everyone knows the Elrod House, created for him by architect John Lautner and completed in 1968. And if you don’t know the Elrod House by name from having seen photos of it published endlessly in magazines or online, then you surely know it from a memorable sequence in the 1971 James Bond movie, Diamonds Are Forever.

Arthur Elrod was the most successful interior designer working in the Palm Springs area from 1954 to 1974. His firm, Arthur Elrod Associates, completed countless projects in the desert and across the United States. He designed vacation homes, main homes, second homes, third homes, model homes, spec houses, and designer showhouses.

His rise paralleled the growing modernist movement in desert architecture, and he worked alongside the leading California architects of the day—E. Stewart Williams, William F. Cody, Paul R. Williams, Buff & Hensman, A. Quincy Jones, Wexler & Harrison, Palmer & Krisel, Howard Lapham, Richard Dorman, Edward Fickett and, most famously, John Lautner.

He respected architects, and they respected him. His clients adored him. And yet, apart from the Elrod House, very little is remembered about his design practice. Unlike architecture, which stands a reasonable chance of surviving intact or being restorable, interiors are rarely found unchanged 50 years on. And interior designers are often given short shrift in academic circles, not taken as seriously as architects and rarely accorded the acclaim they deserve. Elrod is a prime example of an interior designer whose work was ahead of its time and published extensively, and yet he has become a footnote in design history.

His life was cut short by a tragic accident. But over those 20 golden years of Arthur Elrod Associates, magic was created. It’s time to bring Arthur Elrod and his work out of the shadows and return him to his rightful place as one of the most influential designers of the twentieth century.

Photo of Arthur Elrod.

Arthur Elrod photographed at the home of Ann Peppers in Redlands ca. 1959 when he was in his mid-30s. His immaculate appearance—suits always impeccably tailored, never a hair out of place—was as important to him as the personal attention and innovative environments that he provided for his clients.

George R. Szanik/George Szanik papers (Collection 1799), Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It takes a small army to bring archival material to life. My heartfelt thanks to everyone who contributed to this book.

For archival research and photography:

The archive of Arthur Elrod Associates, Inc., and Harold C. Broderick is housed in the Lorraine Boccardo Archive Study Center at the Palm Springs Art Museum, Architecture and Design Center. This book would not exist without the support and assistance of Brooke Hodge, Director of Architecture and Design, and Frank D. Lopez, Archivist/Librarian. www.psmuseum.org/architecture-design-center/

Jeri Vogelsang and Renee Brown, Palm Springs Historical Society, Welwood Murray Memorial Library. www.palmspringshs.pastperfectonline.com

Palm Springs Public Library. Archival issues of Palm Springs Villager, Palm Springs Life, and Palm Springs telephone directory. www.Accessingthepast.org

Desert Sun, California Digital Newspaper Collection, a project of the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research at the University of California, Riverside. https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc

Clemson Agricultural College archive. tigerprints.clemson.edu

Simon Elliott and Molly Haigh, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. George R. Szanik photography archive.

Special Collections, Getty Research Institute. John Lautner, Welton Becket, and Julius Shulman archives.

Kathy Carbone, Institute Archivist, California Institute of the Arts, Chouinard Art Institute archive.

David Glomb, who photographed Palm Springs Modern and picked up the thread for this book. Anthony Tam for permission to show the photography of Leland Y. Lee. Paula Taggart for sharing the photography of her late husband Fritz Taggart.

Writer and architectural historian Melissa Riche, whose book Mod Mirage: The Midcentury Architecture of Rancho Mirage was recently published by Gibbs Smith.

Steven M. Price, the author of Trousdale Estates: Midcentury to Modern in Beverly Hills (Regan Arts, 2017), who contributed a snappy take on the Eugene V. and Frances Klein House in Trousdale (see p. 116).

Los Angeles designer Brad Dunning, a walking design encyclopedia and part of the wave of homebuyers who started restoring houses in Palm Springs in the mid-1990s.

To those who knew or worked with Arthur Elrod and who helped breathe life into this narrative:

Arthur Elrod’s nephew Michael Calloway, who provided family photographs and remembrances. Michael grew up in Easley, South Carolina, and visited Palm Springs several times between 1962 and 1971 to stay with Elrod and help out in the studio. He was the only family member Elrod took under his wing.

Nelda Linsk, longtime Palm Springs resident, model, Realtor, co-owner with her late husband Joseph Linsk of Galerie du Jonelle, one-time owner of the Kaufmann House, client and close friend of Elrod’s, and subject with her great friend Helen Dzo Dzo Kaptur of Slim Aaron’s impeccably classic Poolside Gossip photograph, which freeze-frames Palm Springs at the pinnacle of midcentury chic.

Mari Anne Pasqualetti, daughter of architect E. Stewart and Mari Williams. After she graduated from college with a degree in textile design and returned to Palm Springs, Mari went to work for Arthur Elrod. She started in January 1968 as an assistant to the newly hired Steve Chase just as the firm had moved into its new showroom. Mari worked there for two years until she took a job with an interior designer in San Francisco. She now resides in Arizona.

Katherine Plake Hough, former chief curator of the Palm Springs Art Museum, who worked at Arthur Elrod Associates from 1973 to ’75 as an assistant designer. She majored in interior architecture at California State University, Long Beach and was hired to take the thumbnail sketches of Arthur Elrod’s and William Raiser’s custom furnishings and develop them into large-scale drawings and details for cabinetmakers and upholsterers, as well as to create perspective drawings to show clients.

Marybeth Norton, hired as a receptionist/administrative assistant in 1973/74. After Elrod’s death, she worked for a design firm in Newport Beach, then moved back to Arthur Elrod Associates in 1976 as a project manager/assistant designer under the partnership of Steve Chase and Harold Broderick. She left with Steve Chase in 1980 when he formed his own company and worked with him through 1994. Upon his death, she became a partner in his ongoing company for eight years, then left to form her own company in 2002.

Paige Rense-Noland, former editor in chief of Architectural Digest, now editor emeritus, who credits a handful of leading interior designers, Arthur Elrod among them, with helping her turn the magazine into an international powerhouse.

Charles Hollis Jones, the renowned furniture designer, who met Arthur Elrod when he was a teenager working at Hudson-Rissman, the leading supplier of accessories to the design trade in Los Angeles. When Jones left to design his own acrylic and Lucite furnishings, Elrod was one of his first and best clients.

Catherine Cody Nemirovsky, the youngest daughter of architect William F. Cody. She organized an exhibit on her father’s work titled Fast Forward: The Architecture of William F. Cody, which debuted at the A+D Museum, Los Angeles, in 2016 and then traveled in 2017 to the Palm Springs Public Library. Cathy is working on a book about her father’s complete body of work.

Palm Springs benefits from a tightly knit and very proactive network of organizations run by people who appreciate, support, and fight for historic architecture and design. These include Modernism Week, the Palm Springs Modern Committee, Palm Springs Preservation Foundation, Palm Springs Historical Society, Palm Springs Historic Site Preservation Board, and the Racquet Club Estates Neighborhood Organization. My thanks in particular to Mark Davis, Gary Johns, Steven Keylon, Chris Menrad, Brian McGuire, and Robert Perry.

The many fellow architects and authors of John Lautner who over the years have helped raise his profile and place his work in the architectural pantheon, where he belongs: Helena Arahuete, Frank Escher, Alan Hess, the late Bette Jane Cohen, Mark Haddawy, and Judith Lautner, and the John Lautner Foundation.

The children and grandchildren whose families had homes designed by Elrod and to former and current homeowners: Debbie Hamling and Robert Ball, Philip and Margot Ittleson, Billy Steinberg, Keith and Jill Crosley, Jo Haldeman, Steve Maloney, Jan Weinstein, Michael Johnston, and David Zippel, and Rick Lord.

For their insight and input: Barbara Foster, Peter Wolf, Timothy Braseth, Trina Parks, Susan Secoy Jensen, Ron de Salvo, Sidney Williams, and Lauren Weiss Bricker.

And, finally, to my publisher, the late Gibbs Smith, who filled a much-needed niche in Palm Springs for books about Desert Modernism. I enjoyed our conversations, and his passion, intelligence, and curiosity about design will be greatly missed. It has been a pleasure to collaborate on this book with editor Katie Killebrew and book designer Kurt Wahlner.

THE BEGINNING

Photo of young Arthur Dea Elrod Jr..

A young Arthur Dea Elrod Jr. in a family photograph from the mid-1930s taken in front of the modest farmhouse on Flat Rock Road in Anderson, South Carolina, where he was raised.

Courtesy Michael Calloway

Arthur Elrod was notoriously tight lipped about his childhood. He wasn’t being deceptive. He simply never, ever talked about his family.

He merely did what countless others who leave the past in the past have done before him—he took the part of his upbringing that he disliked the most and rewrote it to suit his narrative. And he never looked back. By the mid-1960s his bio stated unequivocally that he was a native of Atlanta. The vagueness about his place of birth extended to his date of birth. His grave marker says simply 1923 to 74. Newspaper and magazine articles used 1924, 1925, or 1926 as their base of reference.

He was born Arthur Dea Elrod Jr. on August 8, 1924, the only child of Arthur Dea Elrod (1886 to 1941) and Jessie Herron Elrod (1888 to 1963), on a small farm on Flat Rock Road, Anderson, South Carolina.

He was close to his schoolteacher mother, Jessie; to his farmer father, not so much. After the influenza epidemic of 1918, the Elrods took in and adopted orphan Samuel Lee Calloway, who became Samuel Elrod Calloway, and raised him alongside their son.

Sam’s son Michael Calloway says that his father and Arthur never got along. Sam, even though he was six years older and taller, resented having to do all the tougher farm chores and felt mistreated by Arthur Sr., while Uncle A.D., as Michael called Arthur Jr., was sheltered by his mother and never got his hands dirty.

Michael Calloway, who grew up 30 miles away in Easley, describes the Elrod farmhouse thus: "It was a simple brick house. It still has the big tree and dirt driveway we pulled in on when I was a kid to visit Grandma Jessie every Sunday. The driveway continued to the back, where there was a chicken house on the left, complete with brick furnace to mature the eggs. There were chickens everywhere in the back. On the right was a milk house for cows. I don’t remember how much land they had, but most of it fell to the back right of the house. My father plowed it with a mule.

On the far right end of the yard was a pear tree that looks like it’s gone now. There was something about that lonely pear tree I liked. Jessie had plants and trees I had never seen before. There was a straw swing on the porch and cacti in pots she had brought from Palm Springs. Early on, Uncle A. D. flew her out there and had her visit. I still have one of her paintings of the mountains. She was quite a good painter. He bought her a Plymouth with push-button transmission on the dash—the latest thing then. We were amazed at Uncle A. D. But now you can see why he had to leave.

Arthur Elrod had no interest in being a farmer and was determined to put as much distance between himself and Flat Rock Road as possible. He started by going to the then all-male military school Clemson Agricultural College (now Clemson University), about 20 miles away in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the only options were to study animal husbandry and agriculture or textiles. Elrod chose textiles. Thanks to cotton, the textile industry in the South was a massive concern that employed hundreds of thousands, and Clemson was the first southern school to train textile specialists. It offered a well-regarded four-year course in its School of Textiles in textile engineering, textile chemistry and dyeing, and weaving and designing. Elrod enrolled as a sophomore in textile engineering for the 1942 to 43 academic year.

After one year at Clemson, he went to Atlanta to work at the city’s leading upscale department store, Davisons, which was then owned by R. H. Macy & Co. His interest in textiles may have steered him to a job in the home furnishings department, a pattern he would repeat over the next 10 years. Atlanta was his first big-city experience. It’s where he realized that in order to advance his career he would need to study interior design. And it’s where he preferred to start his biography.

Around 1945 or ’46, Elrod headed to Los Angeles to take an interior decoration course at the Chouinard Art Institute, an independent arts school at 743 Grand View near MacArthur Park. I don’t think he headed west because he knew anyone or had any family connections there, says his nephew Michael Calloway. I think he wanted to get as far away as he could to a progressive place. He wasn’t the least bit interested in the Elrod family, except for his mother. I’m amazed he kept the Elrod name.

Chouinard offered a professional four-year curriculum that included courses in fine art, advertising illustration, animation, costume design, and interior design. The emphasis was on teaching the practical side of the arts so that students would find employment directly after graduating, especially in the booming motion picture industry. Among the instructors were artist Millard Sheets, furniture designer Milo Baughman, and architect Thornton Abell. One classmate was Bob Winquist, who would become one of the most influential teachers of character animation at Chouinard and then the California Institute of the Arts. The interior decoration course was taught by Philip H. Pratt and included classes in interior